Ahem!!!

A Laravel 4 package for creating and managing notifications

Ahem is a simplly enables you to :-

• Create notifications and add their messages.
• Add multiple messages on a sinlge notification.
• Define custom notification types or extend existing ones.
• Easily define how each notification type is rendered.
• Easily render your notifications in HTML or JSON.

Installation

Add the following to your composer.json

"codenest/ahem": "dev-master"

Then run composer update in your terminal.

In order to start using Ahem, you need to add it's service provider and facade in your application. To do this open app/config/app.php.

In your providers array add

'Codenest\Ahem\AhemServiceProvider',

And in your aliases array add

'Ahem'  =>  'Codenest\Ahem\Facades\Ahem',

Configuration.

By default, Ahem has success, error, warning and info notification types defined in its configuration file and you may wish to add your own, edit or remove some of these notification types. To do this, you need to publish the config file to your app by running the command below.

php artisan config:publish codenest/ahem

========================

Basic Usage.

Before getting into details, lets have a look at how we can use Ahem's default notification types.

Adding Notifications

Adding single message notifications.

Ahem::success()->message('Login was successfully. Welcome.');
Ahem::error()->message('Wrong email or password.');
Ahem::info()->message('Somebody send you a message');
Ahem::warning()->message('Your account subscription will expire in 3 days. Please renew.');

Giving notifications their unique id

Ahem::success('login_success')->message('Login was successfully. Welcome.');
Ahem::error('login_error')->message('Wrong email or password.');

In the above case, I have used login_success and login_error as the ids. This id uniquely identified the notification and I recommend it if you have multiple notifications on one request and you would like to reference some of them at a later stage. As you saw in our first example, the id is not necessary. Your can leave it blank and the notification will be assigned a unique integer id.

Multiple messages and notifications headings.

Adding an array of messages with an heading.

Ahem::error('login_error')
		->messages(array('email' => 'Enter a valid email address', 'password' => 'The password field is required'))
		->heading('Something went wrong');

Adding validation error messages.

public function postLogin()
{
    $rules = array (
                'email' => 'email|required',
                'password'   => 'required'
        );
   $validator = Validator::make( Input::all(), $rules);
   if($validator->passes())
   {
       Ahem::success('login_success')->message('Login was successfully. Welcome!!');
	   return Redirect::to('/');
   }
   else 
   {
      Ahem::error('login_error')->messages($validator->messages())->heading('Something went wrong.');
	  return Redirect::back()->withInput();
   }       
}

Notifications for the same requests.

As we are going to see later, notifications are automatically flashed into the session on creation and cleared once they are rendered, you might want to add notifications for a single requests that don't need to be flashed. We do this by simply setting flashable to false

Ahem::error('login_error')->message('Login error. Try again.')->flashable(false);

=======================

Rendering Notifications.

Rendering all avaliable notifictions.

{{ Ahem::renderAll() }}

Rendering all available notifications for specific types.

{{ Ahem::renderAll(array('error', 'warning')) }}

Rendering all notifications for a given type.

{{ Ahem::renderError() }}
{{ Ahem::renderSuccess() }}

Rendering a specific notification.

{{ Ahem::renderError('login_error') }}
{{ Ahem::renderSuccess('login_success') }}

Rendering notifications without clearing them from the session.

I had mentioned before that after you render a flashed notification, It automatically be cleared from the session. In some cases, we might need to keep some notifications in the session even after they are rendered.

Render but keep all avaliable notifictions.

{{ Ahem::renderAllButKeep() }}

Rendering but keep all available notifications for specific types.

{{ Ahem::renderAllButKeep(array('error', 'warning')) }}

Rendering but keep all notifications for a given type.

{{ Ahem::renderButKeepError() }}
{{ Ahem::renderButKeepSuccess() }}

Rendering but keep a specific notification.

{{ Ahem::renderButKeepError('login_error') }}
{{ Ahem::renderButKeepError('login_success') }}

Extending